Kem Cho? (How are you?) - Softcover

Inhaltsangabe

A literary novel about a Gujarati American daughter, the parents who cannot let her go, and what it costs to choose a life they did not choose for her.

Kavya Patel is twenty-one, a senior at Rutgers, and pre-pharmacy because pharmacy was decided for her before she was old enough to argue. She lives at home in Edison, New Jersey, in a house where her mother reads her face the way other people read weather, where the front door is counted in and out, and where the family hotel off the Turnpike pays for a future no one thought to ask whether she wanted.

What her parents do not know: for eight months she has been seeing Arjun Mehta. What they also do not know: she has registered for two English classes. Six credits that will appear on a transcript in May.

One of those classes is a comparative religion seminar, where she reads the Bhagavad Gita for the first time as something other than an object on a shelf at home - a book about a man stopped on a battlefield and told to act anyway. Duty is the word her parents use the way other families use a lock. In the seminar it becomes a question instead, and it will not stop being one.

Then a dinner is arranged with a suitable boy. A phone is checked. And the argument the Patels have spent twenty-one years not having arrives all at once, with a price attached.

Kem Cho? is a close, unflinching portrait of a family in which love and control have grown into the same gesture, and of a young woman learning the difference between being obedient and being good. It takes seriously the thing many novels about immigrant families flinch from: that some parents do not change, that understanding is not the same as being forgiven, and that a daughter may have to pay full price for a life of her own.

Set over four months in the Gujarati community of central New Jersey, told in Gujarati and English, and written with restraint rather than melodrama, this is a novel for readers of Fatima Farheen Mirza, Celeste Ng, Avni Doshi, and Jhumpa Lahiri - and for anyone who has ever loved a family they could not live inside.

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